The John Ford Movie Mystery

by Andrew Sarris

1st American ed

Genres: Film, Nonfiction, History

192 pages, Hardcover

First published May 27, 1975

About the author

Most famous for his 1962 essay "Notes on the Auteur theory" which popularized this film criticism technique in America. He wrote for the Village Voice criticing films and literature before bringing the Auteur theory from France to America and employing it in analysis of Hitchcock's film Psycho.
He wrote for The New York Observer until 2009 and was a professor at his alma mater, Columbia University where he taught courses on Internationl Film, Hitchcock, and American Cinema.

Trivia: The evil overlord from Galaxy Quest was named after him!

Reviews

[Nick Jones · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like the story that when students complained that the elderly Andrew Sarris kept falling asleep in tutorials, the dean (or whoever deals with such complaints in an American university) said that to have Sarris asleep is worth more than most teachers awake. But for most of his career Sarris was not an academic, but a working film reviewer, churning reviews out each week. He is most famous for introducing the politiques des auteurs into English in the early 1960s and translating it as the Auteur Theory. As an aesthetic theory, a theory of judgment, it was broken backed – to judge a film purely on the way it expresses the director is arbitrary – but it had an important impact on the revaluation of Hollywood, the recognition that it was not just an entertainments machine, but films of stylistic integrity and thematic complexity could, and had, been made there. Here he spends 190 pages to write about John Ford’s 125 films. Many of the early ones are lost which makes the task easier, but he shoots past the films and, even at the most detailed, only spends a few paragraphs on an individual work. This is not a work of detailed textual analysis, but one of throwaway insights, pithy observations, witty insistencies: Sarris does what he does best, write as an enthusiastic reviewer with a broad, but not particularly systematic, knowledge. And the book has a purpose: to show why Ford should be taken seriously. There were a number of studies of Hollywood directors, such as Robin Wood’s 1960s books on Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks, that spend a lot of energy arguing why these directors should be taken seriously...but John Ford had been a respected director for 40 years, he had won four Academy Awards as best director, a couple more for documentaries: he was part of the Hollywood establishment. One can wonder if Sarris protests too much. But, interestingly, Ford had been admired at different times in different ways: his pre-Second World War films, such as The Grapes of Wrath, had been championed by those looking for Social Significance; his post-War Westerns, such as My Darling Clementine and Fort Apache, had been championed by British critics such as the young Lindsay Anderson, for their poetic vision of a mythic America. And Sarris is most enthusiastic about the later work, films from She Wore a Yellow Ribbon through to The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, special note being taken of The Searchers. The mystery in The John Ford Movie Mystery is why do other people not agree with Sarris? But I find it a bit strange. In 1976, the year of publication, I was a film enthusiastic teenager: I remember watching a documentary about Ford on the BBC, seeing many of his films on T.V. and by that time there was a strong opinion that The Searchers was a key Ford film and one of the great Hollywood movies. At one point Sarris mentions that most of the book had been written before Ford’s death in 1973: maybe the times had just left Sarris behind: he is arguing for a change in evaluations, but after it had already occurred...which makes his central polemic a little redundant. But, after seeing a John Ford film, it is always worth turning to this book and reading the paragraphs about the film: there will generally be an idea or two to mull over.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Its not that there aren't contemporary filmmakers whose careers are worth writing about, it's that 1) there is nobody around to write about them in with the insight and depth of knowledge that Sarris wrote about Ford or Wood wrote about Hawks for example and 2) there is nobody around who is interested in reading them.

My favorite Ford films: Wagon Master, They Were Expendable, Stagecoach, How Green was My Valley, The Grapes of Wrath, The Sun Shines Bright, Fort Apache, She Wore A Yellow Ribbon, Rio Grande, Steamboat Round the Bend, Judge Priest.

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

The 2023 revised and expanded edition comes nearly two years after one of the co-author’s deaths, Michael Wilmington. Similarly, the original text was published two years after Ford’s death in 1973. Joseph McBride, my former professor at SFSU and thesis advisor, revises parts of the original text, mostly giving the John Ford interview a facelift, then adds a long final chapter broken into four essays. One of the essays, “Rediscovering John Ford’s Silent Years,” is new, while the other three, from Irishness to race to comedy, are re-prints from McBride’s collection of work as a film writer, Two Cheers for Hollywood: Joseph McBride on Movies, from 2017.
The first three chapters of this book features a memoir, a biographical summary, and an interview. It opens with McBride attending Ford’s funeral, getting solid looks at John Wayne and the other John Ford Stock Company players still alive. As a reader of McBride and former student, it was no surprise to find him placing himself as a character in the story of a great filmmaker. This makes his writing, versus that which Wilmington presumably did, stand out when not otherwise stated at the beginning of a chapter. The second chapter is a straightforward summary of Ford’s style and filmmaking qualities. And in the third chapter, McBride transcribes an expanded edition of his interview with Ford in 1970, which reveals even less about Ford than Spielberg’s "The Fabelmans." It was a fortuitous day for both: McBride was fresh in town on his first day and would be interviewing Jean Renoir later, and Ford retired. McBride adds an exhausting number of corrections, qualifiers, and notes to the transcript instead of letting it flow, which advances his technique of placing himself in the story while adding little to the original conversation or explaining what Ford means. For instance, Ford will say something, and McBride will add unnecessary (sometimes condescending) context, cluttering it up: “It’s called Chesty, or A Tribute . . . I don’t know what the hell it is. [The release title was "Chesty: A Tribute to a Legend."]” The most interesting part is that Ford gives McBride nothing to work with except usual Ford epigrams. “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
Chapters four through nine are largely unchanged from the original 1974 text, which features fourteen Ford films discussed categorically: the noble outlaw, men and women at war, Ireland, rebels, what really happened, and the last place on Earth. Each chapter feels like an essay separated from the rest, as film writing style used to be in the late nineteen-sixties and early nineteen-seventies. They cover much of the Ford canon, sometimes solidifying it for the first time. For instance, it explains how Ford helped raise the western from a B- to A-film, Ford as self-proclaimed stoic journeyman filmmaker and not an artist, Ford’s interest in the outlaw and good bay guy operating subversively, how much Ford’s Irishness influenced his style. As is the case with many film writers, these chapters focus too heavily on plot descriptions and without enough analysis. Moreover, the analyses often rely on other writer’s theses, whether Robin Wood or Andrew Sarris or others.
At the beginning of chapter ten, titled “Addenda” followed by four essays titles, McBride taps on the dusty mic, asking if you’re still there. He added these essays to discuss the silent films found since 1975 (twenty-seven of sixty-five are now available) and the more controversial parts of Ford’s career: his Irishness, race depictions, and tragicomedy. In his essay on Ford’s silent years, which is the only wholly new, unpublished essay of this 2023 edition, McBride discusses the tension between being an artist and journeyman in Hollywood during the nineteen-twenties and -thirties, the former being highly discouraged in public. This tension, and his insistence on being a journeyman while making art, is what allowed Ford to flourish within the studio system and allow him to make more than 140 films. It’s therefore no surprise, which McBride doesn’t state, that once the studio system and ratings system fully dissolved in the late nineteen-sixties, so did Ford’s career.
The three other essays work as Ford apologia. In particular, the essay on race: ‘John Ford and Race: “We Were on Both Sides of the Conflict.”’ First off, McBride seems to conflate the terms race and ethnicity, which allows him to argue that in fact, because Ford used many different European ethnicities, he created diverse films. He argues that Ford used sympathetic black characters and actors without noticing they were largely the exception to the rule. I understand Ford was under pressure at the time to create certain films for certain peoples, which didn’t allow space for black characters/actors, but that can't be used to prove Ford was ahead of his time because he has used several of them over the course of 140 films. McBride also tiptoes over Native American depictions, again defending Ford against the system he worked in: the studios forced Ford to use non-Native actors to play Native roles and when he could, he would try to make them sympathetic. This is hard to swallow considering his most famous character in all of his films, Ethan Edwards, is also his most racist. While this essay, and my knowledge, can’t fully argue against the point, McBride claims that Ford deals with race in profound ways in a grander design and overview than even Spike Lee. That should turn a few heads. “No other American director has dealt with race as extensively or more profoundly than Ford.” This was written in 2015, not 1975.
While there are glaring points to the book that detracts attention away from Ford or attempts to settle controversial points without much gusto, most of the middle chapters on individual films fitting within Ford’s themes are valuable pieces of scholarship for any student of John Ford. One should seek out McBride’s other, nearly nine-hundred page Ford book, Searching for John Ford, published in 2001 and still the definitive Ford biography, if one would like to learn many more insights into Ford as a person and filmmaker. Speaking of which, a whole other essay/review can be written on Ford’s relevance today. In my estimation, the modern superhero film is just another spawning of the western film genre: good bad guys going against the system to uphold certain values against those trying to destroy them. The Native Americans turned into inter-galactic monsters and the heroes wear spandex suits.

[Ike · Rating 4 out of 5]

McBride is kinda infamous in the SFSU cinema department but you can’t say he’s not an expert on John Ford

[Sam Sagins]

Pretty sure the copy of this I bought online was stolen from a Iibrary so that’s not cool

[Fredrick Danysh · Rating 3 out of 5]

John Ford is recognized as one of America's great movie directors with six Academy Awards to his credit. This work gives background on many of his movies including the epic Westerns shot in Monument Valley with John Wayne. There are numerous photographs. During World War II he did work for the military.